Hi all,
I've just released LightDM 0.9.0. This represents a large number of
changes from the 0.4 series, but the good news is now the interfaces
can be considered stable (both libraries have bumped version number
from 0 to 1). Any breaks in configuration/API/ABI will be considered
high priority bugs.
Some highlights:
* You don't need to run with a configuration file (this was true
before but more settings are now set to sane defaults).
* The default session is 'default' so consider setting it differently
at compile time, setting the default in the config or making a
default.desktop symlink in /usr/share/xsessions
* Greeters are now treated the same as X sessions and are loaded from
/usr/share/xgreeters. Some information is provided to greeters via
hints (which are retrieved from liblightdm). If you are writing a
greeter and it needs additional configuration create a config file
/etc/lightdm/greeter-name.conf.
* Multi seat is supported by adding an entry in
/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf with the form [Seat:seat_name]. Dynamic
multi-seat is planned for 0.9.x.
* Guest account works by looking for a program 'guest-account' in the
path. It works by calling 'guest-account add' to create new accounts
and checks for the last line of stdout for the username. Accounts are
removed with 'guest-account remove username'. I'd like this to go
into the AccountService project at some point.
* The seats and sessions are exposed on the D-Bus object
org.freedesktop.DisplayManager. You can use this to switch users. In
0.9.x there will be an environment variable XDG_SEAT_PATH and
XDG_SESSION_PATH to make it easier to work out which seat/session to
use.
Where to now:
* I haven't got a schedule for exactly when 1.0 will be released, but
as Ubuntu is the primary consumer I expect it to tie in with the
Ubuntu 11.10 release.
* The plan is to have a 6 monthly release cycle (matching
GNOME/Ubuntu) and have a stable/unstable branch (i.e. 1.1.x will be
unstable, 1.2.0 will be the next major release).
Sorry for just abandoning bugs/feedback while I made this big release,
I'll catch up on it all now!
--Robert